


8U-8813

by apolloreyes



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Gen, black mesa, bubby backstory oneshot, i just wanted to give bubby a parental figure :-], minor character gets burned to death, there’s no child abuse but. This is a child being a raised as a lab experiment, this is part of a whole bigger thing but this doesnt require any real context so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29941695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolloreyes/pseuds/apolloreyes
Summary: Subject 8U-8813 awakens for the first time.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	8U-8813

“Awakening Subject 8U-8813 from stasis.”

8U-8813 opens his eyes for the first time. He glances around at his surroundings, barely being able to see what’s beyond the glass due to the almost opaque cyan fluid he’s submerged in.

He doesn’t need to ask where he is. He’s already been implanted with more knowledge than an MIT professor. Said knowledge including what MIT is.

He hears someone press a button, and suddenly the cyan fluid become more translucent, allowing him to see the group in front of him. There’s five scientists, three men and two women. The woman with the ponytail is in the middle, looking directly at him.

They watch him for a few minutes, all scribbling down on their shitty little clipboards.

“Vitals are showing up normal. Subject is stable. Physical development is as expected for a six year old human male.”

She flips through the papers on her clipboard, putting her pen in her mouth.

“Mental development, mental development, mental development…” she repeats, clearly looking for that page. “Ah- Here it is!” She scribbles down something, most likely his subject ID, then looks back up at him.

“Can you tell me your subject number?”

“8U-8813.” He’s surprised he can speak clearly in the fluid.

The woman’s eyes light up as she excitedly turns to her coworkers. “He can speak!” she whispers, although 8U-8813 can still hear. He thinks he’s supposed to have heightened senses of some kind, but it’s also possible she’s just bad at whispering. The annoyed looks she gets from the other scientists tell him it’s a mix of the former and the latter.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Black Mesa.”

This continues for a while. She’d ask him a question, he’d answer, and the scientists would write something down. Sometimes it’d be a fact or memory he was implanted with, such as the names of the planets, and sometimes it’d be a simple observation, such as how many of the scientists are wearing glasses. It’s incredibly tedious. 

Eventually, they seem satisfied with his answers, and all but one left. The woman with the ponytail. She said something to them about making sure 8U-8813’s vitals were stable before putting him back into stasis, but she’s also a really bad liar.

“Well, eight-one-three!” 

A nickname. Odd. 

She clasps her hands together excitedly. “You’re progressing along so well! If all goes well, by next week you’ll be cleared for limited exposure to the environment!”

“Will I have to answer these boring questions again?”

“Oh-” She seems caught off guard. “You- You find them boring? That’s-” She grins. “That’s perfect! No, more than perfect, my superiors will be ecstatic! And the next time won’t have as many questions, just a few to make sure your senses and cognitive abilities are stable.”

He huffs. “But I know I’m fine. Why can’t I just tell you that I can count and all that other boring stuff.”

She shakes her head. “I know, I know, it’s boring, especially for someone of your intelligence, but sometimes we aren’t even aware of our senses deteriorating. Took me 10 years to realize I couldn’t see more than three feet in front of me and needed glasses!” She laughs. 8U-8813 can’t help but snicker. 

She goes to speak before the alarm on her watch cuts her off. “I’m so sorry, one-three, but I’ve got a big meeting in five minutes. I’ll be back to chat with you tomorrow, ok?” She goes to the panel next to his tube to, he assumes, put him back into stasis. “I’m Dr. Carlisle, by the way. I’m looking forward to working with you, Dr. Eight-One-Three.”

His last thoughts are of how nice the title of doctor sounds before he completely loses consciousness.

* * *

Dr. Carlisle was right. Within the next week, he was able to exit his tube for the first time. The intervals outside started out small, mostly because he initially couldn’t last more than a half hour outside without wanting to puke.

It ended up taking nearly two months for him to be able to go without the tube for more than five hours. Which isn’t fun when you’re impatient, like 8U-8813 is. He sometimes wonders if he was deliberately made this impatient, or if that was part of his personality that developed on his own. When he asked Dr. Carlisle, she didn’t know, but she was incredibly excited when he started inquiring about himself and the world around him. It makes sense why, he supposes. The whole point of his existence was to create the perfect scientist. 

The perfect scientist shouldn’t  _ just  _ know things, he should want to learn as much as he can and keep asking questions. He’d be a pretty shit scientist if he was satisfied with his own knowledge, a glorified encyclopedia that’d eventually become out-of-date. 

Dr. Carlisle is more than willing to satisfy his curiosity whenever she can. When she’s tasked with observing him, she brings whatever books he asks for, and even brought him along to a rocket launch test.

She even tells him about her personal life when he asks. While initially it was a way to distract her from whatever quiz they were focusing on (She rambles. A lot.), he eventually found himself actually interested in her life. Her name is Joan Carlisle. She’s a 28 year old Stanford graduate. She has two cats, named Luna (four years old) and Olly (six years old), who take up the majority of the photos in her wallet. She was born in Massachusetts, but came to New Mexico immediately after graduating. She’s an only child. Her dad fought in the second World War.

Their sessions together very quickly become time to just… bond. Dr. Carlisle just writes down whatever makes her superiors happy. At this point, it’s incredibly obvious that 8U-8813 is developing just fine, thank you very much. No need to ask him how many fingers you’re holding up. He would never admit it, but he finds himself incredibly attached to Dr. Carlisle.

At one point she even asks him to take a photo with her to keep in her wallet.

He can’t help but wonder if this is what having a mom is like.

But as the perfect scientist, he should’ve known that this wouldn’t last forever.

* * *

He doesn’t really attempt to keep track of time, since he can be put in stasis for weeks at a time, but it was a little while after the status reports started referring to him as a seven year old human “female” rather than a six year old one.

The scientist that came to wake him from stasis wasn’t Dr. Carlisle.

Something felt very wrong.

“Where’s Dr. Carlisle?” he asks, trying to prevent his voice from quivering. She’s always the one to wake him from stasis. He tries to tell himself that she might just be sick, she might just have a family emergency, she might-

“She was removed from the project,” the scientist says coldly, pressing buttons on the panel.

“What…?”

The fluid starts to drain the tube. 

“As a scientist, you should know having a emotional attachment to the subject is an unwanted variable that could disqualify the results. The integrity of this experiment must be protected.”

8U-8813 feels his stomach sink. He feels a hot, burning rage he’s never experienced before in his life. It keeps building and building and building inside of him until-

The scientist is no longer looking down at him. He’s on his knees, screaming as fire burns every inch of his skin. 8U-8813 doesn’t even notice he’s crying until the scientists screaming stops. He looks down at the pile of ash in front of him.

He wants Dr. Carlisle back.


End file.
